by James Frey
And then a bright light, the brightest the whitest the hottest he has ever known.
And then nothing.
Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs’ aërial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.
23 MONTHS, 5 DAYS LATER
Below Mercator Station, Palisades, New York, United States
Aisling and Hilal walk in the dawn twilight up a single-track dirt path. The Hudson River lies at their back, gray and flat and wide and silent but flowing powerfully toward the Atlantic Ocean, several miles to the south.
With the exception of a pair of four-inch folding knives, neither Aisling nor Hilal is armed.
Both like it that way.
They walk without urgency along the switchback trail that leads to a series of ladders and lifts plying the vertical cliff face up to the heart of Mercator Station. Their lungs and legs work against gravity. Though it’s August, a summer chill is in the air and, as always in this part of the world, the sky is hung with gray clouds. These aren’t very ominous, though—worldwide, but especially near the Impact Zone, the storms subsided significantly about nine weeks ago—so the two former Players haven’t bothered with rain gear for their morning hike.
The basic geography of this area is mostly unchanged PA. The 200-million-year-old basalt cliffs that rise like a wall on the western shore of the river were unaffected by the impact. Being that old, and that durable, gives a thing a good measure of staying power.
These cliffs are the bones of this ancient valley—one that predates the existence of all sentient life in the Milky Way, including that of the Makers, by over 150 million years—and they loom now before Aisling and Hilal. They are dark and glistening, and while it isn’t raining, the two Players still hear small gurgles of water moving all around them and under their feet, making its way down into the river and, soon enough, to the ocean itself.
But if the bones of the world survived here (and they categorically did not survive in the Crater Zone), the skin of the world did not.
The ecosystem here has simply been reset.
On that day nearly two years ago, everything was either burned away or torn from the ground and carried on the shock wave to the vast Debris Wall to the south and east. The force of the blast was so strong that even this wide fluvial rift did not catch any detritus, and it was laid bare. Out in the open, where Aisling and Hilal are right now, it’s not much different than it was in the immediate aftermath of Abaddon. Not a single beam of direct sunlight has penetrated the clouds since then, and so the entire landscape is denuded and brown or black or gray. All that remains is dirt and rock, and all that grows are mushrooms.
Hilal stops and inspects one of these, bulbous and priapic, with a bright orange top. Aisling walked right by it without noticing. He stoops, unfolds his knife, and pokes the fungus. “Amanita caesarea,” he says quietly. “A young one.”
Aisling stops and turns. “Hmm?”
“This mushroom.” He cuts it quickly at the stem and slips it into a plastic collection bag. “Childress will like to see it, I am sure,” he says.
“Childress would like to see a turd so long as it was growing out of the ground,” Aisling points out.
Hilal simply smiles, tucks the bagged mushroom into a pocket, and stands back up. “Your phone is buzzing,” he says.
Aisling looks left and right and pats her pockets. “Goddamn it, where—?” She finds her phone and slips it out and quizzically looks at the number display before shrugging and pressing it to her ear. “This is Aisling,” she says curtly. A slight frown gives way to a smile as she says, “Oh hey, Jenny.”
They talk.
At this moment Jenny is in Kazakhstan with Greg Jordan. They’re preparing to board a brand-new Titan XA1 rocket carrying the final payload to an orbiting ship that will, in two weeks’ time, embark on a three-year voyage to Mars. Their mission: to serve as the resident Maker and Endgame experts for an international team tasked with retrieving kepler 22b’s ship for research and development purposes.
And also, Aisling hopes, to retrieve the body of Pop Kopp so that he can be brought home and laid to rest.
Aisling grins broadly at some joke Jenny makes, the purple mark on Aisling’s left cheek expanding as it curves from the corner of her eye down to her jaw. This is the last visible remnant of her time spent in 22b’s ship, although she has no shortage of more personal and emotional remnants.
She has nightmares once a week or more. And Hilal hears about each one, writing down the details, keeping a log, trying to help Aisling understand them and get past them.
The women continue to talk. Hilal moves up the trail, patting Aisling’s arm as he passes. She winks playfully. The cool air rises around his shoulders and neck from the Hudson River below. He makes three sharp turns, going higher up to Mercator, until Aisling’s voice isn’t more than a murmur fading into the background.
He stops. He is at least 15 meters higher than Aisling here, and the view is completely unobstructed. Boats and barges and ferries ply the water to the south. Above Manhattan, along the tops of the cliffs on the eastern bank, are newly built towers of steel topped with red blinking lights, and at their feet are lines of semipermanent buildings. Some of these are half-domed and green, others are not much more than white rectilinear trailers. These kinds of structures line the horizon to the north as far as the eye can see. Almost directly above Hilal a system of cables spans the river, and Hilal spies the sodium-orange lights illuminating the cabin of the cable car on the far side. Dark silhouettes of men or women are in it, preparing for the first crossing of the day. Above the car is the domed and pinnacled complex that is Van Houten Station, sister to Mercator, which is behind Hilal and just out of view over the lip of the Palisades.
Aisling and Hilal—and Shari and Little Alice too—live in Mercator, along with 1,845 other men and women. Shari and Aisling and Hilal are true friends now—thanks mostly to Little Alice, but also to hours of counseling and a desire to set an example for the world by healing the rift that the Makers tore between them. If the lines can come together and heal, then the people of the world can too, and while Earth and its nations have not been transformed into a nirvana, they have made great if imperfect strides toward it.
Hilal and the others are here to lend their hands at righting what was put so wrong. The mission of everyone working here is twofold. The first is to terraform this area of the ruined Impact Zone. Under each dome grows a thriving ecosystem of young forests and wetlands and meadows that will, when the sun returns, be uncovered and set free onto the land. Second is to oversee the final stages of rubble remediation of the city that was once called New York but that is now, at least unofficially, called Phoenix East. This will be the first city to rise PA, a beachhead for the New New World, one born of defiance and determination and cooperation and goodwill. And preparing the land to build it anew has required a lot of work. While most of the structures in the five boroughs of New York were torn from the ground and flung into the Debris Wall, many, many metric tons of infrastructure remained underground, all of which had to be dealt with and, in most cases, dug up and removed.
Soon, as Jenny begins her journey to the Red Planet, 58 heads of state will travel here from all corners of the world to cut a ribbon on the New Jersey side of the New George Washington Bridge. Hilal and Aisling
and Shari and Little Alice will be at the US president’s side, and on that day the rebuilding will begin in earnest.
The cables twang overhead. Hilal squints. The cable car dips out and moves over the water.
The clouds, usually uniformly gray like an unending blanket, are graded and defined, like a bunch of dark cotton balls.
Aisling calls for him and waves. She’s done talking to Jenny. He rubs his arm below the wooden ring he wears around his bicep. The ouroboros. A symbol of violence and all that they fought against, but also a symbol of rebirth.
All that they fight for.
Aisling walks toward him, wending up the path.
His pocket vibrates. He retrieves his phone and looks at the display.
Little Alice has texted him. Come up, Uncle. I want to show you what I made this morning.
He writes, 10 minutes.
The wind picks up.
His phone buzzes again. I can see you. Look up.
He glances over his shoulder. Thirty meters above, leaning between the steel bars of the railings, is Little Alice. She’s five years old now and taller than any child her age. She leans out farther than Hilal likes, but she is young and excitable and Hilal is certain that Shari is a few feet behind her, calm and attentive. Understandably, Shari hardly ever leaves Little Alice alone.
Little Alice waves fiercely. Hilal waves back.
The wind whistles down the valley as a bright flash, yellow and orange, slices the air. It hits the wet basalt cliff a few meters below Little Alice’s feet. The girl pulls from between the railings and jumps up and down and points to the sky in the east. Hilal can’t hear her, but he knows Little Alice is ecstatic, and that Shari must be ecstatic too.
Hilal swings around. Aisling is less than a meter away, and she too stares to the east, slack-shouldered and awestruck.
The clouds have broken, and there, filtering through a hole, are three long spears of dawn sunlight.
“Holy shit, Hilal,” Aisling says.
“Yes,” he says.
A loud air horn goes off at Mercator, and seconds later another horn answers from Van Houten, then smaller horns echo up and down the valley from substations and garden domes and mess halls and office blocks and dormitories.
Hilal bounds down to Aisling and wraps an arm around her shoulders.
The sun stays.
The wind blows.
The clouds move.
The sun disappears.
The horns blare on nonetheless.
“That was beautiful,” Aisling says.
“Yes.”
“We’re actually going to make it, aren’t we?”
Hilal looks Aisling directly in her eyes. His skin hideous and scarred. Hers porcelain and clear but marked. Both marked by Endgame.
“Yes,” he says.
And then together: “Yes.”
Endnotes
ihttp://goo.gl/afsgAT
iihttp://goo.gl/D4hJFC
iiihttps://goo.gl/b1GIbn
ivhttp://goo.gl/SGdRu8
vhttp://goo.gl/jHDVwM
EXCERPT FROM ENDGAME: THE FUGITIVE ARCHIVES VOLUME 1: PROJECT BERLIN
KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT:
ENDGAME
THE FUGITIVE ARCHIVES
VOLUME 1: PROJECT BERLIN
CHAPTER 1
Boone
December 24, 1948
“How you doing, Peterson?” Driscoll asks as we descend through the thick fog. “You look a little green. Do me a favor and try not to lose your lunch all over my plane, okay?”
The C-54, buffeted by a crosswind, shakes fiercely, rattling us like peas in a can. It’s been like this the whole flight. Driscoll grins at me.
My name isn’t Peterson, but he doesn’t know that. He also doesn’t know that I’ve been in far more nerve-racking situations than a rough approach. I may look like any other 19-year-old GI, but I’m far more than that.
“Last time I flew over Berlin, I was dropping eggs on their heads,” Driscoll continues, shouting to be heard above the roar of the engines. “Now I’m bringing them eggs for their breakfast.” His joke about the bombing raids that destroyed huge parts of the city during the last days of the war isn’t funny. I smile anyway. I need him to think I’m just one of the guys, at least for a little longer.
The truth is, I am a little bit nervous. I’ve been training for war since I was a kid. I’ve been through more than Driscoll and all the other soldiers on the plane ever saw in boot camp. But this is my biggest mission yet. A lot is riding on it. And yet I don’t even know exactly what it’s about.
I know the basics. I’ve got to find a man and get him out of Berlin. I know his name and his suspected location. And I know that if he won’t come with me, or if someone else gets to him first, I have to kill him.
A simple plan. That’s why I know there’s more to it than the council has told me. For some reason they don’t want me to know the details of why this man is so important, which means they don’t want anyone else to have that information either. If I get captured, my enemies can try as hard as they want to get me to talk, but I can’t tell them what I don’t know. Not that I would talk anyway. I’d never do anything to jeopardize the safety of my line. The council knows that, so it bothers me a little bit that they’re taking this precaution. More than a little bit, if I’m honest. This is the first time since I became the Cahokian Player that they’ve kept me in the dark about something. I don’t like the feeling.
I push that irritation from my mind as the Tempelhof airstrip appears—seemingly out of nowhere—and meets the wheels of the plane. The rumbling intensifies, shaking my bones, and I hang on as Driscoll applies the brakes. Through the cockpit windows I see groups of children standing on top of piles of debris that line the runway. They wave at us, grinning and clapping their hands.
“Look at that,” Driscoll says. “It’s like we’re Santa Claus.”
In a way, we are. After all, it’s Christmas Eve. And along with the ten tons of eggs, milk, meat, flour, and other basic supplies in our hold, we’re bringing bags of wrapped gifts to hand out to the people of the city. Chocolate bars for the kids. Cigarettes for the men. Perfume for the women. The war ended in 1945, but more than three years later, Berlin is still trying to recover. And since the Soviets cut off all sea and land access to the city’s western zone earlier in the year, life has gotten even harder.
Thankfully, the airlift organized by the American, French, and British militaries has been successful in bringing supplies to the city. It’s also provided me with a handy way inside. Posing as an American soldier has been easy enough. There are so many young men being assigned to the dozens of daily airlift flights coming out of Rhein-Main Air Base that no one notices one more. All I had to do was put on a uniform and start helping load the plane.
When the Skymaster comes to a stop, we reverse the process begun three hours earlier, transferring everything in our cargo area onto the trucks that pull up one after the other.
“Nobody disappear!” Driscoll shouts as we launch into action. “General Tunner’s orders! We get this stuff off, turn around, and land back in Frankfurt in time for eggnog and cookies!”
The airlift is a well-oiled machine. Planes land at two-minute intervals, and the total time from unloading to takeoff is 25 minutes. Everything moves like clockwork, and everyone has a job to do. I can’t make a break for the main terminal or someone is bound to notice the missing pair of hands. But when we’re almost finished, one of the mobile coffee trucks arrives filled with pretty German girls who hand out drinks and smiles, and I take the opportunity to slip away while the others are distracted. I don’t look back, and nobody calls Peterson’s name. Even when they finally notice he’s gone, it won’t matter, as the United States Army has no record of him anyway.
Once I’m away from the airport, I make my way into Berlin. In an attempt to maintain a balance of power, the city has been divided into four sectors, each one controlled by one of the Allied superpowers: Grea
t Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In reality, though, it’s become the Soviets on one side and everyone else on the other. Fortunately, Tempelhof is in the American sector, and a GI walking through the streets is a common sight. I’d prefer to be dressed like a civilian, but at least wearing a uniform means that nobody questions me. And in case they do, all my identity papers carry the name of Alan Peterson.
It’s early evening, a little past seven, and already dark. A light snow is falling. And even though the streets are dotted with rubble—some of the buildings I pass have shattered windows and walls that have crumbled, so you can see into living rooms and kitchens still filled with furniture—it somehow manages to feel like Christmas. There are wreaths on some of the doors, and trees decorated with ornaments are visible in the parlors of some of the houses. The shops I pass don’t have much displayed in their windows, but signs reading FRÖHLICHE WEIHNACHTEN are taped to the glass.
Bells chime, and when I turn a corner, I see people walking into a church. The inside is lit by candles, and the sound of a carol being played on an organ floats from the open doorway. This makes me think of my own family back in Illinois. It’s just after noon there, and I know my mother is getting ready for the Christmas Eve gathering. She’s been cooking all day. The Tom and Jerry bowl and glasses that only come out once a year are set out on the sideboard. She’s probably already hung the stockings from the mantel over the fireplace, one for each kid, arranged in order from youngest to oldest: Marnie, Evan, Lily, Ella, Peter, me, and Jackson. In the morning, the stockings will all be filled to overflowing. Even mine, although I won’t be there to open it. And even Jackson’s, although it’s been three years since he died. The people of Berlin aren’t the only ones who’ve lost something to the war.
I hurry by the church, clearing my mind by focusing on the address the council gave me. I memorized it, as well as the best route to reach it. Writing things down is risky. As my father told me repeatedly when I started my Player training, the brain is the only notebook nobody can steal.
